Short audio for the people who meet the customer.

NARRAID — BACKGROUNDER Narraid is an AI-powered platform for engaging distributed frontline workforces. It transforms existing brand content into short, podcast-style audio experiences available in 35+ languages, helping brands continuously reinforce product knowledge, storytelling and campaign messages with the people who actually meet the customer. The company is based in Amsterdam and was founded by Melvin Broekaart, who spent more than twenty years in airports and airport commerce before starting it. The problem In multi-brand retail and hospitality, the last conversation before a purchase rarely involves the brand. It involves a member of staff representing hundreds of brands at once, often working in their second or third language, who may never have been told the story of the product in their hand. This is not for want of effort — brands invest heavily in training. The obstacles are reach, recency and language. Field trainers cover the flagship locations while the long tail sees someone once or twice a year. Turnover runs fast enough that by the next visit much of the team has changed. And a session held in English rarely survives the next shift. The stakes are measurable. Research published by PI Insight in 2025 found that 46% of shoppers chose which product to buy on the strength of what a staff member told them, and that 22% say they would not have bought at all without that conversation. In luxury categories, 64% interact with staff before deciding. The approach Narraid treats this as a distribution problem rather than a training one. Brand material is shared once and becomes conversational episodes, most under ten minutes, created natively in each language rather than translated. Frontline teams listen on the free Narraid app for iPhone and Android, in the moments they already give to audio — the commute, a break, the walk across a car park or the length of a terminal. Quizzes and badges are built in, because an episode nobody finishes teaches nobody anything. Alongside the app, the Narraid dashboard shows partners who is listening, what has been completed and how brand knowledge confidence is tracking. It adds to in-person training rather than replacing it. When the groundwork and the refreshers happen in the app, physical sessions can be shorter and less frequent — so the same field team covers more locations face to face, while Narraid carries the languages the trainers do not speak and the sites nobody has been able to justify visiting. The method is grounded in independent academic research, summarised in the company's Learning by Listening white paper. Where it is now Narraid is live across travel retail and expanding into wider retail and hospitality — hotels, bars, restaurants and lounges — wherever a workforce is spread across many sites. In 2026 the company entered Greater China through a local partnership, launching a Simplified Chinese service. Its work has been covered by The Moodie Davitt Report, TRBusiness, DFNI and Global Travel Retail Magazine.